Japan has hanged a Chinese man for the high-profile and brutal murder of a family of four, the first execution of a foreigner in 10 years.<\/p>\n
The man, Wei Wei, carried out the murders in 2003 with two accomplices.<\/p>\n
They fled to China, where one was executed in 2005 and the other sentenced to life in jail.<\/p>\n
Japan has more than 100 prisoners on death row. Fifteen were executed last year, including 13 members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult.<\/p>\n
Japan only started to disclose the names of executed inmates in 2007. Since then only one foreigner has been named – a Chinese man hanged in 2009.<\/p>\n
Justice Minister Masako Mori said she had signed off on the execution of Wei Wei “after careful consideration”.<\/p>\n
“It is an extremely cruel and brutal case in which the happily living family members, including an eight-year-old and 11-year-old, were all murdered because of truly selfish reasons,” she said.<\/p>\n
In Japan, death row inmates are not told of their impending execution until the day it is carried out.<\/p>\n
Wei Wei, a former language student aged 40, had admitted carrying out the murders but denied playing the leading role.<\/p>\n
He and his accomplices had tried to rob the home of businessman Shinjiro Matsumoto in the city of Fukuoka.<\/p>\n
Mr Matsumoto was strangled, his two children strangled or smothered and his wife drowned in the bath.<\/p>\n
Their bodies were weighed down and dumped in Hakata Bay,\u00a0the Asahi Shimbun reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Chinese man hanged in 2009 had killed three Chinese people he lived with in Tokyo.<\/p>\n The increase in executions in 2018 was the consequence of a Sarin nerve agent attack on the Tokyo underground system in 1995 by Aum Shinrikyo, an obscure religious group that believed the end of the world was coming.<\/p>\n Thirteen people died and at least 5,800 were injured in the attack.<\/p>\n Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"